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About Building a Freelance Career in Medical Writing
Do you feel trapped or burnt out in your current professional role? In this episode, we hear from Caitlyn, who faced burnout and dissatisfaction in her clinical rehab role and found a refreshing passion in medical writing and consulting, particularly within LGBTQ+ health companies. Caitlyn walks us through her initial struggles, the eureka moment that came from an online writing course, and how she navigated the subsequent career transition to become a successful freelancer.
Caitlyn recounts her early years as a physical therapist (PT), a role she entered with high hopes and dedication. However, she describes the chronic exhaustion and social energy depletion she experienced, a common issue among healthcare professionals. Despite the rigorous education and training, Caitlyn found herself feeling increasingly dissatisfied, prompting her to seek alternative career paths. The pivotal moment in Caitlin’s journey came in late 2019 when she enrolled in an online writing course. This course not only rekindled her passion for writing but also opened doors to new opportunities.
What started as a side hustle while working for a Telehealth company evolved into a full-time career. In this episode, you will learn how Caitlyn started pitching clients and gradually built a successful freelance career, the financial insecurities and the mental struggles that come with freelancing, the idea of taking on part-time roles as a safety net, setting realistic timelines for business success and building supportive networks.
Caitlyn shares a wealth of insights and inspiration for anyone contemplating a career shift or already in the throes of freelancing. Whether you’re feeling burnt out in your current role or simply exploring new career possibilities, this episode provides practical advice and heartfelt encouragement to help you succeed in your journey.
Resources
10% OFF course that kicked off Caitlyn’s health writing career 🙂 –> Breaking Into Health Writing Online!
Learn more here about the Health Writing course!
- Caitlyn’s LinkedIn
- Caitlyn’s Instagram
- Citivy Consulting Website
- American Medical Writers Association
- Prospology
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Bio Caitlyn Tivy
Caitlyn Tivy helps femtech, women’s health, and LGBTQ+ health companies develop clinically and scientifically accurate information and products through clinical consulting, content development, and medical review. Caitlyn Tivy is from Colorado, and she received her DPT from the University of Colorado Denver.
She started her career in biomedical research, but she pivoted away from academia after two years. She earned her DPT in 2016 and completed a residency in Orthopedic Manual Physical Therapy in 2017. Caitlyn practiced in outpatient orthopedics and pelvic health for about 4 years before she started investigating alternative career paths.
Q&A with Caitlyn Tivy
What is your desired transformation(s) from this alternative journey?
Taking control over my professional future and my income so that all the effect I naturally invest in my work will help me progress professionally and financially.
What was at stake if you didn’t take the risk of pursuing your alternative career?
My mental health – I was incredibly anxious every morning and completely wiped out every night. When I was a full-time clinician, I wasn’t as present with my partner, my friends, and my family in the way I wanted to be.
What was the specific moment you realized your rehab career wasn’t for you? What was your decisive moment to transition to something else?
I started freelancing as a medical writer in 2020, and I realized that most of the time, researching and writing didn’t feel like “work”. I didn’t dread it the way I dreaded going into the clinic and putting on a cheery face every morning.
What are some personal struggles you went through while finding and then transitioning to your business? How did you overcome them?
Owning a business is HARD. You only eat what you kill, so if you aren’t actively seeking and finding work, you aren’t earning money. I’ve learned to manage my calendar strategically to ensure that I’m focusing on practical tasks that will help me earn income, either now or in the near future.
What are the roots of your new career? What was your seed of hindsight to your new career?
This new role brings me back to what I loved about my research days: getting to dig down into the details of a research question and follow the data and the science. I love “deep work” and focusing on one question at a time.
What made you decide to pursue your current career? Why this specific one?
I started freelancing as a medical writer in 2020, and I realized that most of the time, researching and writing didn’t feel like “work”. I didn’t dread it the way I dreaded going into the clinic and putting on a cheery face every morning. My work in the health tech start-up world also showed me how little clinical input many startups receive and how desperately clinicians are needed to ensure their products are sound and effective.
What is the biggest problem you see in the rehab space or rehab private practice space?
Besides the obvious problem of declining reimbursements and provider pay, I don’t think rehab and medicine, in general, are keeping pace with technology and patient preferences to involve it – we’re notorious late adopters of technology.
Transcript of Building a Freelance Career in Medical Writing
Intro 00:01
Welcome to the Rehab Rebels podcast. Are you a rehab professional ready to transition to an alternative career? Hear inspiring stories from others just like you and learn the best ways to bridge your career gap. This podcast has you covered. Now here’s your host, doctor of physical therapy and podcaster, Tanner Welsh.
Tanner Welsch 00:21
All right. This episode is a business transition journey about a physical therapist who transitioned into being a medical writer and consultant. Lgbtq plus health companies develop clinically and scientifically accurate information and products through clinical consulting, content development and medical review. She started her career in biomedical research, but pivoted away from academia after two years. She earned her DPT in 2016 from the University of Colorado, Denver, and completed a residency in orthopedic manual physical therapy in 2017. She practiced in outpatient orthopedics and pelvic health for about four years before starting investing in alternative career paths. Welcome to the show, Caitlyn.
Caitlyn Tivy 01:20
Thanks so much for having me, Tanner. It’s been fun to be here.
Tanner Welsch 01:23
Yeah, thanks for coming on. And where to begin here?
Caitlyn Tivy 01:27
Yeah, there’s a lot.
Tanner Welsch 01:29
There is a lot right. It’s quite a journey.
Caitlyn Tivy 01:32
Totally yeah, I’m happy to talk about it.
Tanner Welsch 01:35
Let’s start off with earlier, in the beginning of the career journey, where you know you’re in a traditional patient clinical rehab role, where you’re in a traditional patient clinical rehab role, and discuss maybe some of the points where you had the sense that, or the first sense of awareness that things weren’t quite right in your rehab career.
Caitlyn Tivy 01:56
Gosh. I feel like this story is so common to so many rehab specialists and all disciplines that I talk to that it just starts really slowly, I think, for a lot of us, because we get our degree and we put in all this effort to get our DPT or our OT degree or what have you, and then we’re finally there, we’ve made it right, so we start working and we’re really in the weeds for a while, especially those first few years. You’re just getting your feet under you. You still feel like you barely know what you’re doing, even though we’re so educated. But even in those early years, for some of us there’s often just something that feels a little off.
02:32
For me, I think a lot of it was how exhausted I felt at the end of every day. I made a lot of excuses for that for a long time I was like, well, it’s just residency. Residency is really hard, you’ll get through it. When you’re done with residency it’ll get easier. And then I got out of residency and started working at a private practice back home here in Colorado and it kept happening. It’s like, well, maybe it’s just getting into this new practice, maybe I’m just settling into a new community and building my caseload and it’ll get better, and then, a couple of years later, still happening.
03:11
Right, I’m coming home every day and I enjoyed a lot of moments in the day, but at the end of every day I just felt like a deflated balloon, just exhausted, no matter how hard I tried to manage my time and take breaks and all the strategies so many of us use. So I think that was one of the first signs for me, and I didn’t have a word for it at the time, but it was sort of my social batteries being completely drained by just having to be on all day long. There were other things too. I mean, all of us know the struggle of having to take documentation home and having to work maybe some extra hours on the weekend because we’re trying to pay off our loans and all these things that add up. But for me, the exhaustion and that feeling of having no social battery left for the rest of my life was the first indicator that maybe full-time clinical care is not right for me.
Tanner Welsch 03:56
Absolutely. Yeah, I think you’re right 100%. That happens to a lot of people, that it’s really like you have this fight or flight response that’s just on all the time, totally, and it’s completely unhealthy. I’ve had some autoimmune stuff happen for prolonged periods of time and it’s just hey guys, this is a sign this isn’t working. Something needs to change, right.
Caitlyn Tivy 04:18
And it’s ironic because we’re educating our patients about that too, right, especially if we work in orthopedics. All the pain sciences around fight or flight and we’re learning more about trauma-informed care and the same problems right, but we’re talking to patients about it and meanwhile we’re living it ourselves. So, yeah, totally, totally feel you there.
Tanner Welsch 04:35
For sure. For you, was there like a specific moment that you realized, man, I’m just I’m not going to do this clinical care anymore, this treatment. Or was it just you mentioned the gradual, it all just built up and then you realized there was no specific moment necessarily.
Caitlyn Tivy 04:53
What was that like for you? I don’t know if there was one moment, but there was definitely a timeframe of a few months late 2019, early 2020, I think where I was becoming more and more dissatisfied and all of the compounding things that had been building up were really coming to a head. And in early 2020, right around the time the pandemic was breaking out. But even a little before, I started investigating more work related to writing and I’d always enjoyed writing. I’d always been a good reader and writing always came naturally to me, and I don’t even remember how I happened upon a course, but I found this course called Breaking into Health Writing Online and the woman who created it was doing a promotion and I was like all right, this is on sale, I’ll grab it and I’ll work on this.
05:36
I started working on it in clinic during the pandemic, when we had open slots, because my clinic never closed.
We had to keep seeing people because we’re in a rural area, so we were sort of a safety net, but our caseload was down, so when I had breaks, I would work on this course. Then I started doing some writing for clients and I got pretty lucky with pitching some early clients that just jumped on it and we’re like, yeah, we’d love to have you write some educational content for us, for our patients. And I think in those few months as I was starting to write for clients more, I realized the time that I was spending writing, because it was usually early mornings before work or afternoons after I got home. I didn’t feel like work in the same way that the clinic did. And that those few months, I think, is when it started to click like, oh, maybe there are other options out there and maybe you aren’t stuck in the clinic full time forever. So I think it was somewhat gradual but it really coalesced over those few months when I really jumped into doing more writing.
Tanner Welsch 06:34
For sure, would you say. Was that the first sense of awareness that you felt that this could actually be a legitimate career, generate some income to live off of path?
Caitlyn Tivy 06:45
You know, I wish I could say yes, but I didn’t believe it. For a long time I was like this is just a side gig, this is for fun and for a little extra play money. You know, I was moonlighting as a writer for three years a little over three years before I decided to go full time for myself, and I worked for a telehealth company during that time. So I was doing a lot of other stuff, but I never thought that writing and consulting and some of the work I do now could be full-time. That took a while.
Tanner Welsch 07:13
Let’s just slide into that, okay. So what I’m thinking is you were working in med tech for a bit and then it sounds like some writing was sprinkled in there and then eventually it got to a point where it was, okay, yeah, this can be a business. So let’s start at the beginning with the med tech stuff. How did you land that? Because that’s a big topic right now. A lot of people are getting me out of clinical care, getting me into med tech. So was that a full-time role? How did you land it? Was it a good fit?
Caitlyn Tivy 07:39
Yeah, I started working for this telehealth company in spring of 2021. And it was funny because, for the last year roughly, I had been already doing some writing and knew that I wanted to do something different than the clinic I was in. But I wasn’t sure what and I think I applied for the role that was posted months prior and totally forgot about it. And then I got a phone call one day from a recruiter from this company. It’s like hey, we’d love to talk to you. Oh great, I totally spaced this and that interview process went pretty quickly and I remember sitting down with my partner and saying is this smart? Do I do this? I don’t know, but I went through, I think, three or four rounds of interviews with them and got a decently good feeling. So I accepted that job in April or May, I think, and jumped into that. There’s a lot of different words. There’s med tech, telehealth, health tech, all these buzzwords right.
08:26
This company, the job I applied for, was a telehealth PT role. It was still clinical in a way. I was still going to be interfacing with patients or, as we call them, members, but I was still talking to people all day long, essentially. But I saw the job as a way to just bridge out of in-person clinical care. So I jumped on it and then during my time there, about halfway through the first year, I was recruited by a colleague, another PT in the company, because this company I was working for was an MSK focused very knee pain, back pain how do we help people do essentially PT from their home using technology? But they were starting to build their women’s health range. They wanted to branch out. So my colleague who had been brought into that team reached out to me and said hey, I know you do some writing on the side. I think she’d seen it on my LinkedIn and stuff like that. Are you interested in helping me with a couple of side projects for this women’s health vertical that we’re building? And I was like oh heck, yeah, that sounds great. So that was very much by happenstance. I think I sort of helped myself into that role by volunteering to be a mentor for other PTs on the team that were starting to see some pelvic health concerns and had no idea and they were panicking. You know typical orthopedic like we don’t talk about the pelvic floor, it’s scary, right. So there was a transition period where some of the ortho PTs had to take a little bit of that and they were nervous. So I had to join the mentorship team and that probably helped put me on the radar for my colleague who brought me in. But I jumped on that opportunity and started doing some help, some work, helping her build out the women’s health platform.
09:59
The thing about startups for those listeners that maybe don’t have as much experience or know is you wear all the hats all the time and you pretty much never have a title to reflect that and usually not pay to reflect that either. You will be brought into lots of different projects and you got to really advocate for yourself because it’s really easy to end up doing a lot of extra work outside of your God description for months without ever transitioning into a new role. So that was part of the challenge there. But I worked in building that program with them for several months and then eventually hit a wall with that company in spring of 2023. They wanted to move me back into a clinical-facing, patient-facing role After I’d spent months just developing this program, doing a ton of writing, doing a ton of writing, doing a ton of brainstorming and big project-based work, which I loved, and I had sat down with my boss’s boss essentially several times and been like I love what we’re building with this, I want to be involved, I want to be part of the clinical development team.
10:58
I’ll lay out this path for you. Here’s how I can help. Did the whole thing. It just wasn’t right for them at the time or what they wanted or what they saw as possible, so they started pushing me back into this clinical role and I hated it. I was not happy. So you know, I mean, we’ve all been there, right? We just, you know, grin and bear it. But I spent several months doing my best and really trying to make it work, hoping that eventually my moment would come, but it never really did. So that’s when I made the decision to leave that company last spring, a little over a year ago, and then things all went crazy from there. But that’s the health tech side of things.
Tanner Welsch 11:35
Okay, so it went crazy. What happened exactly?
Caitlyn Tivy 11:40
Yeah, gosh, I don’t know. I’m sure a lot of your listeners can identify with. A lot of us in these roles are all type A. You know, we like to have a plan, we like to know what’s going to happen, right? I had never left a job in my life without having something planned for the next week, you know, to start a new job. So that was terrifying for me, but I knew I needed to do it for my sanity. My partner made a joke just a few weeks ago. I was like, hey, caitlin, you cried about work in like six months. I was like, yeah, so that was a good sign. I knew it was time, right, but it was scary.
12:12
So I left in May when I said, no, you’re going to spend the next two to three months taking some continuing education, dipping your feet in other things and applying for lots of jobs and I was applying mostly for medical writing jobs at the time, and medical writing is a really complex and deep field. But I had enjoyed what I was doing with my side hustle and working at the startup doing writing. So I was like, yeah, I’ll give this a shot. I had a pretty good portfolio at the time. I was like, all right, I can do this, and I spent the whole summer I took a certification course through the American Medical Writers Association. I did a bunch of LinkedIn courses on project management and other general, more business type skills and I applied for every job under the sun and got nowhere.
Tanner Welsch 12:55
How long did you do that for and, if you don’t mind sharing, how many jobs did you apply for? Yeah, gosh.
Caitlyn Tivy 13:00
I kept count for a while and eventually I got tired of counting. I know it was upwards of 100. It was probably closer to 200. And I was doing this basically from May until middle of July. I did have one job that I got through. It was more of a policy writing role for a health company, another health tech company that was more on the insurance-based side, and I got through five rounds of interviews with them and then they went with somebody else. So that was unfortunate and I think that was the breaking point. At least at that time the market was pretty saturated.
13:30
These were all remote roles too. I live in a rural area of Colorado. My partner’s business is here. We have no interest in moving or really ability to, so I didn’t want to relocate. But the remote workforce job market is really saturated because a lot of people want those roles and post-COVID a lot of companies are moving away from them. Right, and after about two and a half three months of that I thought to myself you’re spinning the wheels, right. I just felt like a hamster on a wheel and trying to get an application in two minutes after it appeared online. Just that rush was a hustle feeling. All the time was too much. So that’s around the time that I realized maybe I look at doing something for myself and starting my own business, which I never really considered before. So it was end of last summer that I jumped into my own business after getting nowhere with job applications.
Tanner Welsch 14:20
Okay, let’s talk about maybe six months before you decided to go full-time with this writing and consultant. What was all that like and how did you get it all together to officially go full-time?
Caitlyn Tivy 14:44
I’ll work myself to death, and my partner owns his own business. I’ve watched how much he does and how challenging it is for him, and I’ve watched other people in my life run businesses and it’s not easy, but there are bonuses for sure, and I just sort of fell into it because of this cycle of I’m getting nowhere with applying for traditional jobs. What are my options? The previous months I mean, I had spent three and a half years at this point doing a lot of writing, and a lot of it was medical content a ton of educational content for patients who might be Googling what can I do for pelvic organ prolapse. So I had laid a foundation. I built a portfolio of work over many months and I just sort of automatically been staging my work on an online portfolio for years already, because it was helpful when I was talking to new clients, yeah, and here are some examples of what I can do. So I had that in place, but I didn’t have a lot of other stuff in place.
15:31
Honestly, I had taken, like I mentioned, a project management course on LinkedIn and that helped me with some organizational mindset that I hadn’t really used before. But when I decided to go full time in basically July, and give myself some time to make my own business. I had come across already a company they’re called Prospology, and it’s a company that’s focused on helping healthcare professionals who want to become freelance medical writers. My work has evolved a little bit beyond writing now, which we can talk about, but at the time I was like, oh, this is perfect, I can’t get hired by anywhere to be a medical writer, so how can I be a freelancer? How can I market myself? So I joined a short-term, four-month program with that company, pressology, to help me get in more of a business mindset, with that company Pressology, to help me get in more of a business mindset, and that was really helpful during those early months. But I’ll be honest, it’s been a lot of trial and error and learning on the fly. There’s not always a way to be like 100% prepared.
Tanner Welsch 16:27
And something I’ll say too. It’s almost I don’t know if it’s the human condition or it’s just really impossible to be 100% prepared for everything that you come across as a business owner, but when those opportunities come and they’re right in front of you, it’s okay. Now it’s definitely the time I need to get my stuff together and get this all locked in, and then it’ll grow and evolve. That’s something I’ve learned too on its own as time goes by, because it can easily be oh no, this isn’t ready yet, because analysis paralysis is not perfect.
17:00
I can’t share it, I can’t post it. You got to do your best and go with it, and then it just grows as you go.
Caitlyn Tivy 17:07
Totally. And it’s funny, titor, I think we as PTs and you know, ots and SLPs we’re really good at sitting on our feet. We just don’t give ourselves credit for that, right? Because when you think about how creative a PT, for example, has to be in the clinic every day to change what they’re offering or prescribing or how they’re treating based on the individual person in front of them, we do that all the time without even thinking about it. But for some reason, we have a little, a lot of us I can’t say for everyone, but a lot of us have a mental block thinking oh, we can only do that in this setting, right. But we’re pretty natural innovators and creative thinkers. And I love what you said about the analysis, paralysis, and I’m thinking back to grad school and how many times our professors would say just fake it till you make it, you’re going to figure it out and you do, right. You do that in clinical care, and the same thing applies in other endeavors in business.
Tanner Welsch 17:58
A hundred percent. I think the same thing happens if you venture down I mean the freelance, entrepreneurial business, any of that route. You’re never going to feel a hundred percent about all of it. You just got to go with it, you know.
Caitlyn Tivy 18:10
Exactly, I think that’s one of the things I learned from the startup world too. They are always building the ship as they’re sailing it, or building the plane as they’re flying it, as I think of the common term, which is scary in the healthcare space. But that mindset, tempered by my medical background and my caution there, those two together, I think, made me a little bit more willing to take some chances and try things.
Tanner Welsch 18:33
For sure. I got a couple of questions for you the time six months before going full time to going full time. Was there a really big challenge or frustration that you had during that time, and how did you overcome that?
Caitlyn Tivy 18:48
Every day. Honestly, I still joke. People will ask me how’s your work going? I’m like, well, it depends on the day, I think personally, for me, the income insecurity is the hardest thing to get used to, and that’s something I’m working on with a business coach about how to make for the long run, how to make income as a freelancer more consistent, Because when you’re used to being salaried, it’s very different.
19:09
I have a lot of personal hangups around money and fear of financial ruin and all this dramatic stuff. So that mental component was the biggest challenge for me of being well, I might make $1,000 this month, but the next month I might make three. So getting used to the insecurity and the variability is a constant challenge that I still face today. I’m lucky that I don’t have dependents, I don’t have a mortgage, I don’t have kids, it’s just my partner and I. So I have more flexibility, I think, than others. But it’s still scary and I think last fall especially, I officially incorporated my business at the end of July, even though I’d been working underneath it, sort of already going to be a historically bad year for the freelance market in general and especially in my area. Just a lot of things were coming together between the economy being still questionable and I was marketing to a lot of startups and startups were having a really hard time last year. I can see that now, but in the moment I was really in the weeds, and in November and December especially, I felt like I was getting nowhere. I was pitching to so many different clients, trying to find more clientele because I had some clients that were putting work on pause for various financial reasons on their side. I also didn’t know at the time that December especially at least in the medical writing world the whole month is just gone. People are in vacation mode and no new work is coming in. Now I know that now I can plan ahead, but I didn’t.
20:35
Then. Those months in late fall where I was just banging my head against a wall and struggling to find clients, there was a lot of that imposter syndrome Like am I not good enough? Do people not like my work? Why are these other freelancers I see out there? Why are they doing well, why aren’t I? Those moments happen a lot. I think a solace for me was following a lot of other people in various freelancing roles. Especially there’s a few out there that really keep it real and they talk about the reality of working for yourself and freelancing and how it is a lot of up and down, so that helped keep me sane during those periods. But it’s still challenging when you’re like, how am I going to pay the bills this month? And it’s scary, I’ll be honest, but there’s a lot of rewards that make up for that scary, I’ll be honest.
Tanner Welsch 21:16
but there’s a lot of rewards that make up for that. So for sure, you just started going full time in July 2023, right? So you know, maybe this hasn’t happened yet, but have you ever been in a situation where it’s like man, I don’t know if this is going to work long term? Should I throw in the towel and do something different, or keep trying to grow and build this thing? What was that like if you had that experience and what made you decide to keep going?
Caitlyn Tivy 21:40
Yeah. So last fall was a real reckoning point. It was a couple months where things really slowed down and I wasn’t sure why and didn’t yet have the perspective to understand that it wasn’t me. So during that time I didn’t throw in the towel totally on my business, but I did panic apply for a few clinical roles because I was like, well, if this continues in January I’m going to have to go full time again. There’s no way. And luckily things have picked up this year, thank goodness, and some of my work that I’ve been putting in last year is coming to fruition.
22:07
Finally, but I did take a very, very part-time PR and enroll at a local hospital. It’s very flexible. I can basically pick the days that I want and I’m pretty much never going to do more than one day a week for more than a few weeks at a time. So it’s very sporadic, which is nice, and I’m going to keep it for a while because when slumps happen I can lean on it. I also still see a handful of patients at a local clinic right down the street so I can pick up more people there when things get slow. So I didn’t give up, I didn’t take a full-time clinical role and say screw this business. I’m never looking at it again. But I did take out an insurance policy, if that makes sense, to have something to fall back on when times get slow.
22:48
But I’ve had several of those reckoning moments. When I initially started the business, I said I’m going to give myself six months and I’m going to reevaluate in February and see where I’m at. I’m going to look at my finances and say is this going to work long-term, how is my business doing? I chose that number kind of arbitrarily. Honestly, now that I’m talking to more and more, working with more business people and working with a business coach and talking to people that have built their own businesses more, I realized that six months is not a great metric for is your business going to succeed? It’s got to be longer than that, but I didn’t know at the time. So I’m working on a quarterly check-in system with myself right now and trying to sort of systematize that. But I’m not going to make any rash decisions every three months because things change so much and it might be a few years before I have a profitability from the business and that’s fine.
Tanner Welsch 23:41
But that’s something I’ve learned along the way and I have these backup options behind me now to make me feel a little safer. Yeah, I was finishing up a blog post writing for next degree with John, who will come on, and something that I put in there was I had actually both two things to talk about, one for each of what you just said. And so the building businesses over time was what I included, because I talk about side hustles and my PT or my podcasting journey in the blog post and I talk about how long it takes on average, to create a successful online business, like in the podcast space. I think average is like four years. Well, a lot of entrepreneurs say three to five. The first two years you’re just figuring stuff out and trying to build up, whatever it is, your product and service and get the revenue stream going. I mean, it’s just, it’s crazy man, it’s a real risk. It’s a real risk reward thing. You’re going to have to risk it and it may not work out, but the idea is is it’s aligned ideally with what you want to do or a skill set you want to learn or people you want to learn from, and so, when it’s all done, you either A have all that network and those relationships and those connections and or B, you’ve developed a skill set by going down that route that you can ideally pivot and use in something else.
24:56
And the other thing with the insurance policy I think it’s a great idea. There’s, like some of the med tech things that are coming in with Luna therapy. They’re only offering it for physical therapists, but they currently but they’re working on speech path and OT as well and it’s an app where you can just go on and see, like, do home health I’m pretty sure it’s part B in your local areas and you can just get on the app and see what’s available. So things are changing. Ideally, it’s going to be a little bit easier, hopefully, for us to have maybe a little bit of side insurance on the side to where it’s okay. If I am slow on the business, I can pick up this with this new med tech stuff. So we’ve talked about some of the scary stuff about being business owners and entrepreneurs. What do you love most about your new reality?
Caitlyn Tivy 25:39
A lot of things and I try to really keep it real because there’s so many business influencers and stuff out there that are like I made 100k in six months. Great Good for you. You’re one of the 1%.
25:51
Great so I and I’m really honest about it like, yeah, I have panic moments, totally it’s scary, but I don’t want to underplay the things that I love about this work too. So so glad you asked about that. The flexibility and the autonomy, I think are the biggest things for me. I learned pretty quickly, especially in the startup environment that I was in. That company grew really fast while I was there and it went from being pretty small, scrappy startup vibes when I started to becoming way more corporate I cannot tolerate and that quickly showed me you’re not really made for big corporate America, caitlin. You’re a little too independent for that and that’s fine.
26:27
It was a learning journey for me, but because I’m working for myself, I don’t have to deal with that. And journey for me. But because I’m working for myself, I don’t have to deal with that and I have a lot of my own autonomy to make my own schedule and figure out when I want to work, when I work best, which clients I want to work with. And then it does take time. I’m not going to create any illusions that a lot of times in the beginning you’re taking any work you can get. That’s normal, but you get to become more picky over time. But the fact that I get to choose and I don’t have anybody staring over my shoulder and micromanaging me makes all the difference.
26:58
And I made the joke earlier that I’m a workaholic and I’ll work my tail off. But I think a lot of us are in some ways and you have to keep that in check. But I had the moment where I sat with myself and said Caitlin, this is part of your personality. You are always going to give 110% and you cannot turn that off. So if you’re always going to give 110%, is it worth it giving it to yourself in your business or giving it to someone else who’s paying you a portion of probably what you are actually making for them, right?
Tanner Welsch 27:25
100%. I wish I could click a fire emoji and have the fire emoji. If I’m not.
Caitlyn Tivy 27:32
Totally, that’s how I feel every day. Just let none fire. Totally, that’s how I feel every day. Let none fire.
Tanner Welsch 27:36
Yeah, like I a hundred percent agree with everything you just said. A lot of people that I’ve talked to that have businesses have said the same thing. And on these journeys where we’re like reach a breaking point, so to speak, of man, I just can’t do traditional clinical care anymore, at least for me too is why am I giving all of this to somebody else? And that’s what’s crazy about corporations and huge companies. It’s like this thing, that’s like this huge corporation of many people. It’s not like you’re talking to the name of this business and it’s a person and they can understand and see where you’re coming from. There’s so much hierarchy and I’m just going to say BS like that gets involved when it gets so big and it’s why am I, why am I sacrificing my health literally for this? And it makes that investing in yourself and potentially going down a business route or entrepreneurial route or freelance route, whatever, more realistic. Okay, I’ve had enough of this, let’s go try something different.
Caitlyn Tivy 28:37
Exactly. I mean, the breaking point is a real thing and for me I knew when I left my job at the startup I had a call with the person I directly reported to, who wasn’t a clinician herself, but she was very emotionally intelligent and I liked her a lot and liked working with her and the first thing she said to me I put in my notice on Friday and we had met on Monday and we got on this call and she said you look better. Oh, is it that obvious? Probably was because I had cried on a call with her a couple weeks before. But she’s like you look like a weight has lifted off your shoulders. And yeah, I have no idea what I’m going to do next, but I know I don’t belong here in this corporate space. So thank you for understanding and I was lucky. She was great about it. But people can tell when you’re just surviving instead of being true to yourself.
Tanner Welsch 29:22
Yeah, I want to share a little story too that really is the same example of what we’re talking about here. Something that I never thought as a possibility that could happen, that is a potential of happening, is if you’re in a position long term that you don’t like, it’s going to wear on you and it’s going to change a little bit your personality and make you irritable. And, like you said, people are going to notice and it’s going to reflect on your patience and that customer service and the overall quality of care. You know. You may be have a good relationship with your manager and be like, hey, this isn’t sustainable, I can’t do this long term. This isn’t working. They might be like, yeah, it’s going to be OK, it’s just this long or we’re going to get somebody. Whatever, you may find yourself in a situation where it actually doesn’t get better, there is no help coming and you’re just stuck biting the bullet until a later date than what you thought.
Caitlyn Tivy 30:19
Exactly.
Tanner Welsch 30:20
This can really affect the overall quality of care for everybody involved and even the reputation of the company you’re working for. You know, when you like have some clear water or a pool and you drop a rock or a pebble in it and it just starts and the waves start going. It’s kind of like that, that point where it’s this may not be that big of a thing right now, but it can grow into something much larger.
Tanner Welsch 30:45
And yeah it’s. It’s really tough because everybody’s stuck between a rock and a hard place and you just kind of never know how it’s going to turn out a rock and a hard place, and you just kind of never know how it’s going to turn out. But I just never thought that something like that would happen and it’s definitely a possibility. So I think it’s important, like you said, to know when it’s time to go, and know when it’s time to leave and ideally, be able to set yourself up to make that jump, even if you don’t have all the answers quite figured out yet 100%.
Caitlyn Tivy 31:13
You really hit the nail on the head for something that I’ve been thinking about a lot during this transition, because there’s a lot of talk in the space of any medical or healthcare professional that leads a profession. A lot of us are still working in healthcare adjacent roles, so we’re still making a difference in that area, but there’s so much guilt that a lot of us feel for leaving patient care, whether it’s am I wasting my degree or am I abandoning my patients, whatever it is. But what you said at some point you could actually be doing your patients more harm because you weren’t there, you weren’t engaged. Your brain is firing at about 10% of its capacity. I mean, we know the system is broken. It’s probably not working well for just about anybody, but for those of us that are really feeling that this is not right for me, you aren’t abandoning your patients. You’re probably doing them a service by finding something that you succeed in more and flourish in more.
Tanner Welsch 32:05
So there’s many ways to help somebody other than direct patient care, and let’s take this topic to the next level. You know you were talking about the quality of care between you and the patient and your overall health, and it’s that rippling effect that if things aren’t fixed and they sustain in this bad quality of care, relationship, mental status, then are those patients going to want to come work with you? No, they probably are, and so, technically, you can build a bad rapport and a bad reputation by being in this environment. And technically, if the patients don’t want to come see you and your company, then your coworkers may actually lose out on potential seeing patients too. Right, I mean, it’s this thing that can really blow up. I just wanted to put that out there, that it’s not just necessarily always you and the patient. There’s your co-workers and like other people involved that it can get to.
Caitlyn Tivy 32:58
And you could burn bridges with your co-workers too. You never know if that person that you’ve been working next to could be a referral source for you 10 years down the line, and you don’t want to ruin that relationship either.
Tanner Welsch 33:09
That’s true. What is obvious to you now that maybe you struggled to see in the moment when you were working in the traditional patient clinical role?
Caitlyn Tivy 33:33
bubbliest person. The best definition I’ve seen is that an extrovert is someone that is energized by being around people. An introvert is someone that is drained by being around people and needs time to themselves to recover. I still love people. I’m not a people person. I enjoy seeing, I enjoy social events, I enjoy interacting with people, but I need that time to recharge that social battery that I was talking about. A lot of times, in-person clinical care is not made for folks like me that just feel that sense of exhaustion at the end of every day from giving everything. From a personal level, that was the realization I had. You’re really not built and wired for something that makes you be on to this level every single day. It’s not you, caitlin. You’re not broken. You’re just not the right fit for this role and it isn’t the right fit for you For sure.
Tanner Welsch 34:22
How did you figure that out? Was that in a transition phase outside of a traditional clinical role, into jumping out into trying to do the freelance, into a business stage thing?
Caitlyn Tivy 34:37
I think it really dawned on me because, I’ve mentioned before, I was afraid that I was going to be a workaholic and that I would never look up for my work, and that hasn’t come to fruition. I’ve been better about regulating than I thought I would be, I should say, but I think I really realized I can sit at my computer and work 10 or 12 hours in a day on my consulting work, my writing, my building, my business building, my website, whatever, and when I’m done I’m like oh, I’m just done, I feel fine, I’m going to go ride my bike now. Fine. If I had worked six hours in a clinic, I would feel wrecked.
Tanner Welsch 35:07
Yeah and that, like you said, just being aware of well, okay, you know you don’t like this, but being aware of what you do like, and then kind of gravitating towards that. So that makes sense.
Caitlyn Tivy 35:18
I still love. I love the science behind rehab. I love talking about pelvic health and women’s health. That is so interesting to me. I just don’t necessarily want to do it to individual patients, one at a time.
Tanner Welsch 35:28
Yeah, absolutely, it’s like a better fit for you and who you are. Yeah, absolutely, it’s like a better fit for you and who you are. All right, Caitlyn. So wrapping up here, there’s something that you like to share with listeners who may be in a similar situation or situations and want to transition to possibly doing some freelance stuff or taking their freelance side gig to the next level thing.
Caitlyn Tivy 35:51
There’s so many cliches. I think you can do it and believe in yourself. I’m not going to give next level thing. There’s so many cliches. I think you can do it and believe in yourself. I’m not going to give any of those, but I think having even for some.
35:59
I was just talking about what an introvert I am but even for those of us that are sort of self-driven introvert, we need support and networks, and it was really important to me when I went into business for myself that I not put all of that on my partner either, because he has his own stresses and his business and I can’t rely on him to be my. You know I can vent to him anytime, but I don’t want to be layering all my stress on him and I don’t want to be, you know, calling up my parents and laying all my stress on them either. You know I want to keep some separation between my work and my loved ones. So I really was intentional about building a network of people that I can complain to and talk and be real with but also be supportive of. So I have several networks that I’m in.
36:41
I have a group of other women who are freelancers, mostly in writing space. We’re a Slack channel together and we can chit, chat. It’s like a little co-working space, so if we need a break we can go you know meme at each other there and we can also ask for input and ask for vibe checks if you will. So we can really keep it real in that space.
37:01
Working with the Prosphology program for four months was great because I got to again talk through these questions that I maybe thought were stupid. Never were. I’m afraid to ask these to a client or someone that I’m trying to impress, but I can ask these to my business colleagues in this group and I’m starting another business coaching program next week with a different group, just to change it up and again having that network of people that I can bounce ideas off, whether it’s just to vent or whether it’s to ask very specific, how do I get over this hurdle? Having little groups of people everywhere that I can rely on for different questions has made all the difference, especially when I’m knowing panic mode or stuck in the weeds on a problem.
Tanner Welsch 37:39
Yeah, 100% agree. I’ve been in a mastermind group of online entrepreneurs since COVID and it’s been a great experience. I don’t think I’d be where I’m at and it’s like you’re saying. It doesn’t really sound like a lot, but just having a group of people to ask am I doing this right? What do you guys think about this? I’ve never done this before. It’s just a huge, just help of getting through the journey. And also, something I want to share is something Rehab Rebels is starting to do is actually we are beta testing a mastermind group for rehab clinic owners. So we have private practice owners that own their own clinics. They see patients and see how that goes. But I really want to open it up at some point to online entrepreneurs, likely in just the health space. So, yeah, we’ll see it’s all a learning, growing project and see how it goes.
Caitlyn Tivy 38:32
But I love that people are starved for community still. I mean, I know we’re post-COVID, but I think there’s a hangover from that or people are really interested in building those communities in this digital age. So I love that you’re creating that space to help people with exactly this, this issue how do I stay grounded with real human beings that can check me when I’m going crazy?
Tanner Welsch 38:51
For sure. Right that support and accountability Totally, I love it. Yeah, well, Caitlyn, thank you so much for taking time to come on and be on the show and share your story. It’s been great.
Caitlyn Tivy 39:02
So thank you so much for having me. It’s been great talking about it.
Outro 39:05
Thank you for listening to the Rehab Rebels podcast. If this podcast was useful, make sure to hit that subscribe button and leave a review. For more information about transitioning to alternative careers, head to rehabrebelsorg or follow us on Instagram at Rehab Rebels podcast. We’ll see you next time.
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